Gustave Doré is my favorite artist. I can freely admit that his art does not compare to Da Vinci’s genius or Rembrandt’s theatrical elegance. However, Doré’s wood engravings accomplished something few artists had up until his time: the widespread recognition of the masses.
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel is breathtaking. Van Gogh’s The Starry Night is thought-provoking. Picasso’s Guernica is chaotic. Doré may not have been as revolutionary as these artists, but Dore’s works are notable in a different way—besides being magnificent, they are nostalgic. Because of Doré’s widespread influence on popular culture in his time and the two centuries since his death, many “ordinary” people recognize his art style, even today.
Origen would subscribe (maybe?)…
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One piece, The Triumph of Christianity Over Paganism, is exceptionally detailed. It features an ascended Christ in the clouds, elevating His cross and commanding an army of angels against the various pagan pantheons. Michael, the archangel, leads the host of heaven, pointing his sword directly at Zeus.
Opposite of the heavenly army is the retreating pagan horde in disarray. While the army of heaven unites against their foe, the pagan army flees away in all directions. Doré paints a winged Lucifer averting his eyes away from the heavens while still propping up the trio of Greek gods considered the most powerful of the Roman pantheon: Zeus (Jupitar), his wife Hera (Juno), and their father Cronus (Saturn).
Doré artfully captures the repercussions of Christ’s sacrificial ministry on the ancient religious culture. Before Christ, the world was overwhelmingly pagan. After Christ, the world would become overwhelmingly Christian. Before Christ, the world was overwhelmingly polytheistic. After Christ, the world would become overwhelmingly monotheistic. Christ is the idol-crusher.
The religious scene has never been the same since. Paganism is either destroyed or fundamentally transformed when it encounters the power of Christianity. As the Church exploded across the Roman Empire, it overpowered the Hellenistic gods. The Druids and Celts of the British Isles often readily smashed their idols in exchange for the promises of Christ. And after over five centuries of missionary efforts, Christianity finally conquered Slavic mythology. These are only a few of Christianity’s successful conquests. Most often, paganism can not survive when Christianity thrives.
Hinduism is an example of a pagan religion that endured but was radically transformed by Christianity. For instance, Sati, or widow burning, was a common ritual in pre-colonial India. Under the influence of missionary William Carrey, Britain prohibited the practice. When one Hindu priest protested the ban, Sir Charles James Napier replied,
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”1
While Hinduism today is still false, it has been Christianized and betrays the moral code of its pre-colonial roots.
A New Paganism
However, a new kind of paganism is rising in Western culture. As secularists seek to rid God from society, they unwittingly open the backdoor for the pagans—not ancient paganism, of course, but a Christianized paganism. Ancient paganism can no longer thrive in a Western world that still holds to a semi-Christian morality. So, the secularist man must adapt paganism to fit his lacking spirituality.
They are spiritual atheists. They are religious secularists. They are nominally pagan. They worship gods they do not believe in.
Secularism is icy in a way that does not comfort man’s longing for spiritual warmth. As such, the secularist has had to fill the God-void with other means of worship. In the USSR, the state itself filled the religious emptiness. George Orwell masterfully depicts state worship in his dystopian novel 1984. By the end of the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is brainwashed to rely on the totalitarian regime for his spiritual fulfillment. Where once Smith inwardly rebelled against the state, now he devotedly contemplates the poster representing the government,
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”2
Unfortunately for the USSR, they learned that the government was a poor replacement for God.
The Modern Creed
While the secularist tendency to elevate and search for hope in the government persists, today’s paganism goes far beyond mere state worship. For example, secularists may not bow down to idols representing nature. Yet, they berate cattle farmers for the resulting methane, even though an estimated one billion people suffer from protein deficiency.
They may not worship a fertility deity with hedonistic rituals, yet they have their own reprehensible sacraments, “for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly (Rm. 1:26-27 ESV).” And like most parents, they perpetuate their beliefs to the next generation. So, they sexually mutilate their children—children who are so young that federal law prohibits them from even getting a tattoo.
What about human sacrifices? Supposedly, these have been abolished, they say. Meanwhile, women murder their own children en masse at abortion mills or from the comfort of their homes. The enduring influence of Christian morality brings these mothers feelings of guilt for their actions, so they assuage their shame by calling their babies inhuman terms like fetuses, tissue, or the Orwellian “products of conception.”
While paganism may have evolved, the demons behind the ancient idols are the same behind modern ones.
The Wiccan Rede, the creed of modern witchcraft, is also the confession of contemporary Western culture, “An ye harm none, do what ye will.” On the sentiment of this statement is founded all of secularist spirituality. Consent, instead of Christ, becomes the beacon of morality. Of course, “harm” can be redefined as needed to maximize immediate pleasure. Unsurprisingly, the modern pagan creed has only led to more disunity, pain, and shame.
Paganism? Dust in the Wind
And yet, paganism cannot conquer the Church. Why? Because Christ has destroyed the earthly pantheon under his feet. Like Christ, Christians trample underfoot the idols hallowed by this world. Clement of Alexandria, a theologian in the late 2nd century, expresses this well,
“The Parian stone is beautiful, but it is not yet Poseidon. The ivory is beautiful, but it is not yet the Olympian Zeus. Matter always needs art to fashion it, but the deity needs nothing. Art has come forward to do its work, and the matter is clothed with its shape; and while the preciousness of the material makes it capable of being turned to profitable account, it is only on account of its form that it comes to be deemed worthy of veneration. Thy image, if considered as to its origin, is gold, it is wood, it is stone, it is earth, which has received shape from the artist’s hand. But I have been in the habit of walking on the earth, not of worshipping it [emphasis mine]. For I hold it wrong to entrust my spirit’s hopes to things destitute of the breath of life.”3
As atheists become more pagan, Christians should not get complacent. They should defend their faith and resist the modern cult. Yet, Christians need not fear. Atheism innately leads to paganism, and the Church naturally conquers paganism. Christianity always wins in the end.
William Francis Patrick, Napier, History of General Sir Charles Napier's Administration of Scinde, and Campaign in the Cutchee Hills, (United Kingdom: Chapman and Hall, 1851), 35.
George Orwell, 1984, (New York, NY: The New American Library, 1950), 226.
Clement of Alexandria, “Exhortation to the Heathen,” in Fathers of the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Clement of Alexandria (Entire), ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 2, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 188.
Interesting article. I know someone who dabbles with Wicca and claims she is pagan and Christian at the same time. Not possible.